After freshening his coffee cup, Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter.com heads out of the office kitchen ready for the next task on Thursday March 20, 2009 in San Francisco, Calif.

After freshening his coffee cup, Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter.com heads out of the office kitchen ready for the next task on Thursday March 20, 2009 in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chronicle

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Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter.com take a brief lunch break on Thursday March 20, 2009 in San Francisco, Calif. Twitter recently started catering lunch everyday as a way to say time and increase productivity around the office. less

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter.com take a brief lunch break on Thursday March 20, 2009 in San Francisco, Calif. Twitter recently started catering lunch everyday as a way to say time and increase productivity ... more

Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chronicle

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Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter.com introduces a guest speaker, a Twittering Scottish cellist, during lunch on Thursday March 20, 2009 in San Francisco, Calif.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter.com introduces a guest speaker, a Twittering Scottish cellist, during lunch on Thursday March 20, 2009 in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chronicle

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Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter.com checks his schedule at his desk on Thursday March 20, 2009 in San Francisco, Calif.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter.com checks his schedule at his desk on Thursday March 20, 2009 in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chronicle

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Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter.com gives a lecture a UC Berkeley class on Thursday March 20, 2009 in Berkeley, Calif.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter.com gives a lecture a UC Berkeley class on Thursday March 20, 2009 in Berkeley, Calif.

Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chronicle

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Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter.com heads back to the office after having an outside meeting on Thursday March 20, 2009 in San Francisco, Calif.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter.com heads back to the office after having an outside meeting on Thursday March 20, 2009 in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chronicle

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Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter.com sends a tweet about a lunchtime performer playing in the office on Thursday March 20, 2009 in San Francisco, Calif.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter.com sends a tweet about a lunchtime performer playing in the office on Thursday March 20, 2009 in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chronicle

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What is Biz Stone doing?

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When most people think of the Internet, they think of its vast reach - the copious amounts of information to search through or be overwhelmed by.

It's an appropriate mantra for the co-founder of Twitter, a service that limits users' messages to 140-character bites (spaces included).

But don't be fooled. Twitter has large designs on the world, even if nobody - including Stone and his business partners, Evan Williams, the company's chief executive, and Jack Dorsey, an engineer - are quite sure what they are just yet.

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Twitter, like many an Internet company before it, is hotter than hotcakes right now. Stone appeared on "The Colbert Report" on Thursday; the company has turned up on the radar of media giants (three stories in the New York Times in the past week); TV shows (Jimmy Fallon uses it to solicit questions from viewers for his guests); and celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher.

Unlike Facebook, a social network where users post photos and keep tabs on their friends via the Internet (and which tried, unsuccessfully, to buy Twitter last year), Twitter is a communications network that allows people to keep in touch via cell phone and/or the Internet. Users can follow their friends or just about anyone registered on the service, or search for topics of interest being discussed at that moment. Twitter gets its name from the avian world - "it's rudimentary communication that creates flocking behavior," Stone said.

At the moment, Twitter is mostly portrayed as a place for bursts of activity and randomness. For an intimate look at one of the company's creative minds behind the scenes, The Chronicle spent a day with Stone. The whirlwind eight hours took him from his home in Berkeley to the company's Bryant Street offices in San Francisco's SoMa to several off-site meetings and ended up back across the Bay Bridge at 4 p.m., lecturing to digital media futurist Howard Rheingold's class at UC Berkeley before heading home.

It was a day dominated by speed, in which he seemed not to know his own schedule, generating a thought: If he goes any faster, will he ever get there?

Walking dog, not eating breakfast, telling life story

Stone, 35, born Christopher Isaac Stone in Boston, grew up in Wellesley, Mass., and lives with his wife, Livia, in an 800-square-foot William Wurster cottage in Berkeley with scarcely any furniture. At 7:30 a.m., he takes Maggie the rescue terrier for a walk, warning me that she is not friendly and that I should ignore her.

Within minutes, he has divulged his life story. "It's a Dr. Doolittle house," he explains, with Pedro the one-eyed pudgy Chihuahua, two cats, a turtle living with a heat lamp in the shower stall, two opossums in the garage and a pen for crows outside. His wife, who grew up in Manhattan, used to write coffee-table books on ceramics but yearned for a career outdoors. Now she is a wildlife rehabilitator. "She set a hummingbird leg recently," he said. "I was amazed."

The two met at publisher Little Brown and Co. in Boston. They scan their e-mail and the news at the only table in the house, a tiny round surface big enough for only two laptops. They are both vegans; she eats toast with Marmite. Stone is busy texting and skips breakfast while continuing his life story.

Exceeding expectations; finding his creativity

Stone has three sisters (two of them half sisters), and his parents are divorced. In high school, he was entrepreneurial, founding a lacrosse team and stepping in to coordinate a senior play when the school decided not to have one. He attended Northeastern University on a scholarship and majored in English studies but disliked the urban campus. "I just thought I had to go to college after high school," said Stone. "No one ever told me I didn't have to."

He tried again at the University of Massachusetts on a theater arts scholarship. One summer, while schlepping boxes at Little Brown, he assisted a supervisor who needed computer help with a Mac. The supervisor, the art director, was working on book jacket design. While everyone was at lunch one day, Stone designed a cover and tucked it into a pile of outgoing designs without telling anyone. When his was selected, the supervisor made Stone a designer. Stone dropped out of college.

"Design is a career where you learn creative decision making," he said. "It's a renewable resource. You never run out of it. It's never like, 'That's it, there is no more.' "

The book company moved its design division to New York, but at 21, he wasn't ready to move to the metropolis. He'd met his future wife; they moved in together. (They married in June 2007 in Mendocino.) In 1999, a childhood friend of Stone's pitched him a friend's idea: starting a Web company called Xanga.com. He and Marc Ginsburg launched it in 2000. "It looked a lot like MySpace before MySpace," Stone said. "It was a blogging community and got very popular very fast. It's ridiculously popular in Hong Kong."

In 2001, unhappy with the direction Xanga was taking, he and Livia moved to Los Angeles, where another childhood friend, Emmy-winning TV director Greg Yaitanes ("House"), invited him to come work in television. As soon as the couple got there, Yaitanes left for Prague. Stone wrote a book on blogging, mulled a return to publishing and, instead, decided to move to Rockport, near Boston, working for Wellesley College's alumni association.

In 2003, Google acquired a company called Blogger, an offshoot of Pyra Labs founded by Evan "Ev" Williams. Although they'd been competitors, Williams sent a note to Stone asking him to work for him at Google, on Blogger. "It was a chance for me to get behind the screen again," Stone said. The couple moved back to California, and Stone helped relaunch Blogger in 2004 with a fresh design and new features.

In 2005, Williams left and Stone went with him to form Odeo, a podcast company. He said he gave up his Google stock options in the process because he wasn't there long enough to be vested. Twitter was a side project that turned out to be more interesting to them. In 2007, Twitter Inc. was formed.

On the way in; running late; picking up Greg

Stone, who used to commute by walking 25 minutes to BART and taking the train (a 50-minute journey) jumps in his new Mini Cooper and picks up co-worker Greg Pass, who runs the engineering team, and heads in over the Bay Bridge. By 9:10 a.m. they're at work.

The office is a scene straight out of the dot-com boom: Brick walls, high ceilings, no cubicles - just desktop work stations for employees who sit side by side - and modern, spare furniture. There's a bike rack (holding nine bicycles); a red London-style phone booth; and a long table with catered breakfast cereals, cow's milk, sheep's milk and soy yogurt, along with freshly cut strawberries. He ignores the food and heads into a weekly management meeting, emerging at 10 a.m. to ask for his first cup of coffee of the day.

Two prospective employees are interviewed during the next two hours. Lunch is an array of soups, salads and sandwiches, including vegan fare, brought in and served family style. Each Thursday, a guest speaker is featured. On this day, a Scottish cellist comes to play a concert broadcast live on the Web, and employees are encouraged to tweet about it.

"Wow, amazing 22 y/o cellist playing at Twitter HQ right now-supposed to be online at http://coffeeloop.com/12:26 PM Mar 19th from web," he tweeted.

The company, which reportedly had 2.7 million users as of November, and which makes no money yet, only recently began providing food to employees. Like other high-tech companies, Twitter is seeing the benefits of keeping its engineers glued to their desks. There are limits, though. There are no plans for biodiesel buses with Wi-Fi and masseuses to bring employees to work (and massage any early-morning stress away), as Google did when Stone worked there. "They went overboard," he says.

On Twitter, users send tiny messages in the way that submarines send sonar pings to the ocean's surface, just to keep in touch with the outside world. Some use it for social reasons, to let friends know what they're up to. For example: "I'm at the international terminal at SFO; if anyone is here, come join me for dinner," someone might tweet.

Others use it for business. Followers of Internet entrepreneur Gurbaksh Chahal's new company, GWallet, are messaged about limited-time discounts for computers and other products for sale. In developing countries, farmers with cell phones might improve their fortunes by asking the Twittersphere about the market price for a bushel of grain. Still others might use it for emergency preparedness. "Earthquake: Golden Gate Bridge knocked down; Bay Bridge is alternate route." Or at least, that is what's envisioned.

One word could change the world

It annoys Stone that Twitter is dismissed as lightweight by some who do not perceive its potential. Rheingold is only one professor studying new technologies and their implications for communication; others include Marla Lowenthal at Menlo College, who sees Twitter as a newly emerging example of "textural orality," that is, spoken words transmitted in abbreviated written format.

One of Stone's favorite stories about Twitter involves James Buck, a UC Berkeley photojournalism student who went to Egypt to shoot protests. He was taken in by police and tweeted "arrested" on his cell phone. Friends at home saw the Twitter and called the dean, who notified the consulate, which notified the embassy. Buck's next message? "Freed."

As strains of classical music waft in the space, Stone and several company executives head out for an off-site meeting. At 3 p.m., he's back in his car, heading over the Bay Bridge to Berkeley.

For an hour, he talks with students at Rheingold's class. More than anything, "It's not about the triumph of technology," he said of Twitter, "but the triumph of humanity."